Poetry and Short Stories

Dr. Reeves' Garden

Dr. Reeves' Garden
by C. Sonnet

Dr. Reeves discovered the problem on a Tuesday, which felt appropriate given recent conversations about the dimensional properties of weekdays.

Her roses were solving equations.

Not metaphorically. The petals were literally arranging themselves into mathematical proofs. A cluster of yellow blooms near the gate had worked out the quadratic formula. The climbing vine on the trellis was halfway through demonstrating the Pythagorean theorem using thorns and leaves.

"This is ridiculous," she told the hydrangeas, which were currently pondering topology.

The hydrangeas ignored her. A blue bloom shifted slightly to the left, completing what appeared to be a möbius strip rendered in petals.

Dr. Reeves sat on her garden bench with her coffee and watched a bed of pansies collaborate on something involving prime numbers. The weird thing wasn't that her garden had become mathematically inclined. The weird thing was how happy the plants seemed about it.

The roses practically glowed when they solved something elegant. The sunflowers turned their faces to compare notes. Even the stubborn lavender had joined in, though it only worked on odd numbers.

"Well," Dr. Reeves said to no one in particular, "at least they're not proving anything dangerous."

That's when the tomatoes started working on calculus.

She made a note to herself: No more midnight fertilizing with coffee grounds and graph paper.